I would like to clear up some confusion over the three strikes policy. Firstly, the bill is NOT retrospective. Any felon currently in jail – or for that matter any felon with convictions for “strike” offences – starts with a clean slate the day the law receives the Royal Assent. Any ambiguity as to that will be dealt with by the Law and Order Select Committee.

Secondly the intention is that a second strike for murder will receive life without parole unless the “manifestly unjust” test is met, which I can readily see as a possibility where – for example – the first strike was one of the less serious ones, and the murder is committed 20 years later, and is not one that would attract enhanced sentencing under the Sentencing Act as it now stands.

With regard to deterrence, there are a number of academic papers – one of them is cited in the explanatory note to the Bill and that paper cites several others – which purport to show a deterrent effect in California as a result of three strikes of about 20%.

It is of course impossible to prove definitively just why violent crime in California has decreased more than 50% since 1994. My reasoning is that if it is NOT three strikes, then we need some cogent explanation of what an alternative explanation might be. One that is seriously argued is the effect of Roe v. Wade, which made abortions legal in the entire US from 1973.

Although they would never put it this way, the theory is something like this: without ready availability of abortions, what used to be called the “criminal classes” reproduced with abandon, and for whatever reason(s), their children followed in their parents’ footsteps. After Roe, such children could instead be aborted.

This theory seems plausible at first glance, but it is quickly clear to anyone with a knowledge of criminology that it is fatally flawed. Firstly, peak crime committing ages are late teens to mid thirties. That being the case, if ready availability of abortions after 1973 was a factor, crime ought to have been plummeting in the early to mid 90″s – 20 years later. Instead, violent crime in California peaked about 1993. In other words the opposite of what the theory posits actually occurred.

Secondly, abortions were always relatively freely available in California anyway. I have heard various other theories on the reason(s) for the rapid decline in crime across the US, but none of them are convincing. Let’s see how things look after a decade of “three strikes”. Mind you, even if the exact same pattern was seen here as in California Kim Workman, Peter Williams and their ilk would probably continue to deny that three strikes had anything to do with it.